By TIOL News Service

GENEVA, JUNE 16, 2017: INDIA is ranked 60th among 130 countries on the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2017, launched at the UN Headquarters in Geneva, moving 6 places up from 66th position last year. India is the top-ranked economy in Central and Southern Asia and has now outperformed on innovation relative to its GDP per capita for seven years in a row. Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the USA and the UK retain their top spots as the world’s most-innovative countries with Switzerland leading the rankings for the seventh consecutive year.

Key findings of the GII 2017 show the rise of India as an emerging innovation center in Asia. The report states that India’s current and imminent development, and its contribution to the region and the global innovation landscape is vital these days. As demonstrated in the GII for some years, India has consistently outperformed on innovation relative to its GDP per capita. Recently India has made important strides in innovation input and output performance, and is now in the top half of the GII rankings. The continual improvement of India in terms of investment, tertiary education, the quality of its publications and universities, its ICT services exports, and its innovation clusters is significant. It is predicted that India will continue on this trajectory, with innovation investments leading to more and more dynamic R&D-intensive firms that are active in patenting, high technology production, and exports. If India increasingly connects its innovation system to the innovative countries in the East, as well as to standing innovation powerhouses in the West, it will make a true difference in Asia’s regional role in innovation, and to global innovation more generally. The emergence of innovative new Asian Tigers, an innovative India, and better innovation networks in the region are likely to be among the most encouraging developments for worldwide innovation in the next few decades.

Explaining the significance of public policy in defining national developmental priorities, Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, Confederation of Indian Industry said, “Public policy plays a pivotal role in creating an enabling environment conducive to innovation. Since the last two years, we have seen important activities around the GII in India like the formation of India’s high-level Task Force on Innovation and consultative exercises on both innovation policy and better innovation metrics.”, he also mentioned that “As part of this success story, CII in collaboration with NITI Aayog, launched for the first time the online India Innovation Portal which aims to capture state-level innovation data and benchmark states on their innovation capacity.” Mr. Banerjee emphasized that “such a mechanism will not only make states competitive but also drive India towards an innovation driven economy”.

The GII is co-authored by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and surveys some 130 countries using a range of metrics and indicators from patent filings to education spending to cultural output in the form of feature films and literature, providing legislators and decision makers a high-level look at the innovative activity that increasingly drives economic and social growth.

This year’s theme of the index is “Innovation Feeding the World,” which looks at innovation carried out in agriculture and food systems in the face of rising global food demand, increased competition for limited natural resources and climate change.